


Your Love Is With Me All Of The Time

by livid



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Incest, Implied/Referenced Murder, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide attempt, Implied/Referenced Torture, Klaus does sex work, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Use of slurs but in a normal person way, Vanya is a closet gay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-28
Updated: 2019-02-28
Packaged: 2019-11-06 20:26:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17946551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livid/pseuds/livid
Summary: The noise that escapes him is high, and animal, and red.





	Your Love Is With Me All Of The Time

**Author's Note:**

> An ode from one Begrudgingly Sober, Profoundly Traumatised Disaster Gay to another.
> 
> PS. Continuity? Chronology? Intelligibility? Fuck no! RHIZOME GANG
> 
> PPS. Heed the tags. xx

**\- October, 2006 -**

It’s hot, unbearably hot, and even in the still dark of his bedroom the air feels like a turgid, suffocating blanket. Sun stripes the wall across from his bed and bounces off the mirror, sets a dazzling arc of dirty aurelion bouncing back towards the roof. 

His skull feels like its being split open. His gut is rotted slush.

From outside: a shout, a thump. Luther. He vomits in his mouth. Swallows most of it back down again.

“This is disgusting,” Ben tells him. 

He closes his eyes. “Disgooostiiing,” he echoes. The axis of the world shifts.

 

**\- December, 2006 -**

She’s less composed than he would have guessed, something artfully dishevelled in the hem of her untucked button down. She’s wearing jeans and her high heels are scuffed, just a little, track marks in the high gloss PVC. 

Her smile is totally disarming, and his hackles are raised so high he could sink back inside himself.

“So, Klaus,” she says. “How are you feeling?”

He smiles at her, sloppy. What Allison calls his ‘camp rictus’. Sarcastic, slutty, and a little murderous. Nothing wrong with that.

He eyes her for a long moment, assessing. Her gaze is level and calm.

“I’m confused,” he says, “What am I doing here, again?”

“You’re here because your family are worried about you,” she says, catastrophically sincere and totally scripted.

“Is that right?”

“When your mother called she told me that you’d recently lost a brother. That you were struggling.”

He drops a hand to the brocade of her chaise lounge, “Well she’s an automaton, so I recommend taking her word on the matter with a pinch of salt.”

She cocks her head, and her hand glides leisurely across her legal pad with the weight and tilt of a very expensive fountain pen. “Why do you say that about your mother?” 

He smiles at her. “Oh I mean that quite literally, she was cobbled together out of old motherboards in the basement.” 

She smiles back, placid. Decides on a change of tack. “So when did you start cutting yourself?”

 

**\- September, 2004 -**

He figures if he spins it fifty-fifty with tobacco his stash should last at least another - couple of hours. Long enough to raid the library for gold filagree and, whatever, faberge eggs. The old man relishes expensive junk almost as much as he hates his children - like taste is a direct correlative to emotional turpitude. 

Klaus has committed to being utterly tasteless.

Tasteless like the magenta of his hand-blown glass bong, already clouding black with resin, which is - missing. Somewhere. Somewhere not where he left it.

“MOM,” he hollers, breath curdling as he listens to the perfectly regular click of her heels coming down the hallway.

“Oh honey,” she smiles as shovels his clothes from his closet to the ratty carpet. “I threw it in the trash.” 

Klaus unravels like a snapped string.

 

**\- July, 1968 -**

“So what was he like, your dad?” Dave says, dropping back against the tree stump. He takes a drag, a slow suck and a quick inhale, chest stilling with a warm, deliberate fullness. 

Klaus takes the joint from his outstretched hand, trying not to marvel at the delicate brush of their fingers. Callused now. Dirty, scuffed, and sweet. 

“Ohh,” he says, “he was an alien.” 

Dave chuffs. Klaus laughs, buoyant, and tries not to bogart. He smokes the last of it, down to the crutch, til the cardboard singes and stinks the air with ink. Weed’s cheap here, cheaper than clean water or good food, almost as cheap as booze, but he supposes he’s a bit of a utilitarian. Old habits die hard. 

“What, a preacher man? A law man? A philosophy professor?”

Klaus giggles, a hiccup bubbling up out of him, cutting through the syrupy sweetness of his blissed out, post-coitial groove. “Oh no no,” he says. “Nothing like that.” Dave’s hand snakes across the jut of his hipbone, through the dark thatch of hair peeking out from his fatigues, across the red bumps of mosquito bites. It feels glittery and so, so good. “Would you believe me if I told you he was an eccentric billionaire?”

“A billionaire?” Dave’s mouth puckers in a cheeky smile; sceptical, indulgent. “Well that would make you one rich son of a gun. And me one very lavishly kept man.” 

Klaus fingers at his dog tags, rubs at the patina of dirt and grime. “Maybe if I wasn’t the family shame. I think if he had the choice Luther would cut me out of the will in a heartbeat.”

Dave presses a kiss to the hinge of is jaw, the top of his cheekbone. “The family shame, huh? I know _all_ about that.”

Klaus drags his fingers down his bicep, tricep, to the soft thin skin of his inner elbow. Something in him glows to watch Dave shiver. “You know what my dad told me when I got the conscription letter?” He pulls back, brows knitting in affectation. “ _‘You best not come back boy. Dying under shell fire’s ‘bout the best we could ever hope for you. An honourable death for a dishonourable faggot.’_ ” 

Klaus stares at him, wide eyed, mouth hanging open. He pats at the prickly fade of Dave’s crew cut, a distressed, soothing gesture. “Dave,” he says. “Dave. There is _nothing_ dishonourable about what you can do with your mouth.”

They burst into bright, heaving peels of laughter. 

Klaus lights a cigarette, smug, chuckling. Dave settles down into the damp leaf litter, the distant lights of camp setting a faint glow across his skin in the deep, blue moonlight. He sets his cheek to Klaus’ stomach, brings his hand in a heavy sweep up Klaus’ thigh. “Do you ever,” he starts. Stops. “Do you ever wonder what they’ll say about you at your funeral?”

Klaus rubs at his grimy neck, digs his thumbs up into the divots of his skull, just how Dave likes. He thinks about the house, the family portraits, Five’s sparse and perfunctory obituary. Ben’s, which was somehow worse. 

“Nothing true,” he says. After all, how could they ever capture this? Would they even try? The best he could hope for is a few op eds before next year’s Pride - the gay superhero, who peaked early and died young, track marks conspicuously absent from the inserts.

Dave hums, a low, sad sound of assent.

“Whatever,” Klaus says. “Fuck ‘em.”

 

**\- April, 2015 -**

“I’ve.” He relaxes his neck, leans back into the uncomfortable dig of the folding chair. The rattling airconditioning unit is so loud, and yet somehow useless. “I’ve been reading a lot of Brene Brown,” the girl says. She’s three seats down from him, looks impossibly young, but her downturned eyes are lined and ancient. She said her name the first day. Anna, Annabell, Annabeth, Analise. “She talks a lot about toxic shame, that kernal of. Self-hatred. That drives us to self-sabotage and self-harm.” 

Across the room Ben stares into the grate of an old, dusty fan. How he manages to be dead and still so dissociative is a marvel to Klaus. 

“And I keep. I keep trying to tell myself that what happened to me wasn’t my fault.” Anna-whatever drops down, folding in on herself, as if to hold the grief inside and shield herself from their judgement; or worse, their boredom. Her next breath comes out high and shuddery. “But I’ve done such terrible, terrible things.”

Klaus thinks about the first time he killed someone. Or helped kill someone. Afterwards their Mom had given them cake and ice cream. A reward. A party. 

They were just bank robbers, which in the grand scheme of things doesn’t seem like the worst thing in the world a person could be. 

 

 

**\- August, 1969 -**

He’s spinning, turning, coming apart. Crashing into the elastic sky and, choking, shuddering, body slipping into the thundering, punching, crunching gunfire. Soaked. Soaked. Soaked in blood. Children, dressed neat in pressed navy, milling at his feet. 

“Hey,” a hand touches him, and his skin spins out from underneath him, rippling into waves and oceans, seas, of blood. “Hey, baby, babe, calm down. I’ve got you.”

The noise that escapes him is high, and animal, and red. 

“Shhh, shhhh, I’ve got you.” 

“I’ve -” he needs to say it, he needs to. The hand moves to his cheekbone, which is not his cheekbone, but a cheekbone attached to him, or something like him, whatever he is, if he’s anything at all.

“Shhhhh, you’re okay.” 

“I’ve,” he starts again. The hand moves across him and he’s torn apart, reconstituted, Frankenstein’s monster, or Hargreeves' monster. One of seven. Pressed neat navy children, bleeding. Ben, who in the end was made of blood, and screaming.

“Come on, baby, come back to me. Come back.”

He can hear someone wailing, a screeching sob, which feels like its all around him, like Ben’s blood, inside him, inside him, coming out of him, and red. He’ll drown. He’s drowning.

“Shhhh, baby, I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”

Salt in his mouth, and wet, and coppery, filled up with the elastic sky and every shaking atom in the universe, dripping wet and red on the stretched rayon of the umbrella. 

“I’ve killed so many people,” he says into the firm, wet fabric of Dave’s chest. The screaming. They’re always screaming. Taking acid in a warzone was such a bad idea.

“I know baby, I know. Me too.”

“I just wanna die.”

The hand, callused on his neck, his own heartbeat deafening in his ears, louder, louder than the gunfire. He says it again, “I just wanna die.”

The hand, callused on his neck, clutching. “Don’t go without me, okay? We’ll do it together. Okay? We’ll do it together. Just, not now, don’t go.”

 

 

**\- May, 2007 -**

Diego catches him. Almost eighteen, and Diego catches him. It’s not the first time, but taking of Diego’s knives was probably a stupid idea. Sue him, he’s drunk, and they’re just so sharp. It could be painless.

“What are you doing?” he says, and it’s still weird to Klaus’ ears to hear him speaking without a stutter. Like he tripped and stumbled and suddenly slotted into place, a Real Boy, without it. 

He rips the knife out of Klaus’ hand. Klaus grabs, but it’s useless, he’s so weak, and Diego is so strong, and then Diego has him in an arm bar and he shouts. The rest is fuzzy.

He didn’t lose enough blood to bother going to the hospital, and they wouldn’t have taken him anyway. 

Later, he hears Luther talking through the door, loud, like he doesn’t care who hears. “It wasn’t serious. It’s Klaus, of course it wasn’t serious. He just wants attention.”

Allison, quieter. She’s always known the better part of discretion. Klaus sinks back into the pillow. They gave him endone, which later would seem like folly. Then: Luther, again. “Ben was our brother too, what makes him so special?”

Whatever she says shuts him up quickly.

Diego comes in five minutes later, stomping his feet, this pinched look on his face. Constipated. “Next time,” he says. “Cut down, not across. You want to hit the radial and/or ulnar arteries if you want a guaranteed kill. Or the carotid.” He gestures to his throat. “But,” his eyes are suddenly piercing, “don’t.”

“Okay,” Klaus says, heavy and ecstatically light. “Whatever you say, man.”

Diego grabs him, and Klaus is ready to shout again, but Diego swallows and Klaus can see his eyes are shining with tears he’s manfully not crying. “Don’t. Promise me.”

Klaus looks at him, and then away. Down at his mother’s careful, robotic stitches. He can’t and he won’t.

He pretends not to notice Diego leave.

 

**\- December, 2006-**

“Teach me,” he says. The bow scratches across a string as Vanya drops her hand. He gestures between them, to the violin, makes a claw of his fist and sways in a virtuoso motion. “Teach me.”

“You’re high,” she says. 

“Moot point, I’m always high.” He’s chewed a hole the size of pluto in his cheek and his guts are a hot, cramping stone. But his brain is sparking and he’s overflowing. She’s his sister and it seems imperative, suddenly, that he understands her magic. Sweet, silent Vanya. “Teach me.”

She sighs, but she hands him the violin. He fumbles, but he manages not to drop it, and as soon as it’s in his hands, it’s singing. 

“Like this,” she says, pushing the foam chinrest up against his collarbone. The stretch of his neck is electric. Then the bow. She turns his wrist so it sits at an angle. “Keep your wrist relaxed,” she says. “Move from the elbow.”

He moves, and the violin shrieks. 

She laughs, and it sounds like church bells. 

“I guess I just don’t have the flare. The talent. The _forte_.” She chuckles; a quiet, muted thing.

“It’s just practice,” she says, taking it from him. Probably a good idea. He uses the opportunity to rifle in his jacket pocket for another cap. He was only dropping home for a minute, to get the rest of his stash, when he’d been arrested by the music. 

He’s halfway out the door when she says, “Hey Klaus?”

“Yes’m?”

“How did you know?”

“Oh well,” he winks, “my one outstanding talent is a ribald kind of mediocrity.”

“No, I mean - how did you know about, y’know.” She tilts her head.

“Darling,” he drawls, or attempts to, “I’m a medium, not a psychic.” Oh, chewing gum, perfect.

She pulls the violin up again, hair falling in a dark sheet across her face. And Luther calls _him_ dramatic. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Well whatever it is,” he pops the gum into his mouth, “the principle is _always_ the same. No one knows anything, ever, at all, and people lie about it with varying degrees of conviction or panache. Pick one, and get good at it.”

She turns her head a little towards him, enough to reveal an almost coquettish smile. “Is that why you’re such a terrible liar?”

He grins back at her, jaw stiff. “Is it better to be convinced, or entertained?” 

 

**\- December, 2008 -**

The rain is heavy, and he’s cold, even through the thick fleece of his jacket. Leather would be better, if he can steal it. Maybe in the morning.

The jeans he’s in are tight, too tight, but they make the slender curve of his thigh look delectable, which is a useful attribute when he’s only ten dollars away from scoring again. He scratches at the itchy welts across his hip where the denim dents and puckers his skin. 

A car slows across the street, and a figure emerges. Celia - tall, willowy, sweet and sultry. Right hook like a shotgun. She waves as the taillights recede. 

She beckons him across the road, under the awning of a locked up Chinese restaurant, lit cigarette ready and proffered in her hand. “Hans, you look miserable.” 

“Hans,” Ben snorts. The rain is wet and glittering in the fibers of his hoodie - which is a neat trick, come to think of it. The ends of his eyelashes meet in little, dewy points. At least now Klaus finds seeing him a skin-crawling kind of unsettling, instead of whatever it was before. That unspeakable thing. Thankfully once he picks up Klaus won’t have any feelings about it at all.

“Rough night,” Klaus says, which seems excessive, as if his shivering, split lip, and black eye hadn’t given it away. It was undeniable that he had a way with people, just unfortunate that when you’re in certain professions people feel they can take liberties in expressing their displeasure. 

He couldn’t be too raw about it, as long as they still paid.

“You planning on staying out here much longer?” Celia asks. It’s really pissing down, the kind of torrential autumnal storm he remembers from when he was a kid. Bad night to be out on the street, but he really needs that last ten dollars. 

“Yahuh.”

“Here, honey,” she shrugs out of her jacket. A heavy, patched, fuzzy thing. The lining feels soft and durable under his hands, but not expensive. “I want it back _tomorrow_ ,” she says. But the next time he sees her she says it’s fine, he can keep it. She doesn’t feel the cold anymore anyway. 

(“Congratulations,” Ben tells him. “You managed to find the one job with a worse mortality rate than being a superhero.”

“Is that all you’re here for?” Klaus asks him. His hands won’t stop shaking. “To make quippy one liners and to turn the screw?” 

“I’m trying to stop you from making any more stupid decisions.”

“Oh lay off,” Klaus says. “Reaaaally hard to imagine it can get much worse.” He tries to unscrew his flask but his hands are shaking too hard to grip it. He clearly spoke too soon.

“It can always be worse,” Ben says. “You could be dead.” 

“Mmm,” Klaus hums, making headway with the screwtop, and drowns out whatever lecture is to follow with a throaty rendition of Take Me Home (Country Roads). The Toots and the Maytals version, obviously.)

 

**\- February, 1969 -**

“Tell me again,” Klaus demands, sinking his fingers into the worn, thin cotton of Dave’s shirt. It’s full of holes and it smells like piss. The texture of it is heaven. 

Dave’s eyes are bloodshot, drifting closed. The promise of a dreamless sleep - Klaus doesn’t care.

“Tell me.”

“Okay,” Dave mumbles, the corner of his mouth is wet and a little crusty against the curl of his lapel. His neck is bright red with welts. One of the other infantrymen stepped on a claymore today, the first Klaus has seen, he needs this. 

“So, when the war is over.”

“You mean when we get home on leave and defect like the dastardly queers we are -”

“Yeah, then,” Dave mumbles, shoving sleepily at Klaus’ rib. “We’ll move to some sleepy little town in Iowa.”

“Why Iowa? What’s so great about Iowa?”

“Whatever, wherever,” Dave says. “Somewhere quiet, is the point. Way out. Real rural. Nothing around for miles.”

“Are you gonna put me up in some one roomed shack?”

Dave snorts. “First we’ll rob your rich papa and then move out to Iowa. Pick up some stray dogs.”

“And what, grow corn?” 

“Yeah we’ll grow corn.” 

“And make moonshine?”

“The _worst_ moonshine,” Dave says. 

Across the tent, Mackenzie starts to snore. Dave looks suspiciously like he’s about to join him.

“And then what?” Klaus asks. 

“We get chickens. A lot of chickens. And a horse.”

“Why a horse?” 

Dave smiles. “Can’t have a farm without a horse.”

“Oh no but we’re queers, let’s shake it up a bit. What about a goat? A couple of goats. I want to name one Stella.”

“Okay some goats, and one specifically named Stella.”

“And then what?” Klaus asks.

“And every morning and every night I wake up next to you. And I kiss you whenever I want to. And when the weather’s warm and the sky is bright we get inebriated on our horseshit moonshine and fuck under the stars.”

“I think when you’re gay married on a farm it’s not fucking, it’s _making love_.” 

Dave laughs, head turned into the pillow. “With a mouth like that I can’t be sweet to you all the time.”

“I guess not,” Klaus says, heavy, stoned, and sleepy. “But sometimes.” 

Dave slips his hand up the back of Klaus’ shirt, fingers ghosting the knobs of his spine. “Baby,” he says, snoring on an exhale. “I’ll be so sweet to you, you’ll see. You’ll see.”

 

**\- October, 2007 -**

On the morning of his eighteenth birthday, Klaus is awake bright and early. But then, he never really slept. His Mom is in the kitchen, baking probably. Although, through the crust in his nose, he thinks he smells eggs. Could be waffles. Seems like the occasion for both.

He passes Pogo on the staircase, flashes what he can only assume is a dazzling smile. “Master Klaus,” Pogo says, and Klaus chooses to ignore whatever his tone is implying.

He was right about the waffles. Diego’s there, helping. A mama’s boy through and through, which Klaus would be more impressed by if he hadn’t turned into such a ruthless killer. 

Luther’s reading comics, Allison’s reading something else. Vanya is, as usual, a mystery. 

Klaus drops his duffle in the doorway. “Happy birthday,” he announces to the room. The look Diego shoots him is withering. 

“Happy birthday, dear,” Mom smiles at him. “What do you want for breakfast? I made everything.”

“Oh,” he says. “I really couldn’t eat.”

“Breakfast is the most important meal of the day,” Mom chides him, and he ignores whatever rude gesture Diego makes behind her skirt. His mood is unshakeable.

“I’m glad you’re all here, so I can save myself a series of tortured goodbyes. I’m leaving, and as much as I’m sure you all hate to see me go, I really love to leave. So,” he claps his hands, “see you never!”

He barely even sees Luther move before he’s dangling half a foot off the ground by the quickly ripping elastic of his shirt.

“You can’t _leave_ ,” Luther tells him. “We’re the Umbrella Academy, you have a responsibility. To us, to Dad, to this family, to the world. You don’t get to abandon that just because things got hard.” His face hardens. “And especially not on our birthday.”

“Oh please,” Diego laughs. “What use is he to anyone like this?”

Luther grits his teeth. “We’re a team. And I get it, after Ben, after Five, it feels different from how it used to. But no one else is running away from this, and you don’t get to either.”

“Really,” Klaus laughs. “Cause Allison was telling me just last week about her impending trip to Seattle. What’s the trashy television show you’re angling for again?” 

The look on Luther’s face would be tragic, really, if he didn’t have Klaus dangling by a thread. Literally. “No,” he says. 

“It’s just an audition,” she says. “It might not pan out.”

Diego turns to look at her, the shiney new keloid on his temple a thunderous shade of pink. “That’s funny, ‘cause I heard a rumour-”

“Oh kiss my ass,” she hisses back.

“No, no,” Luther says. “We’re a team, we’re in this together.”

“Actually, Luther,” Klaus pats his hand as he’s lowered to the ground. “I think you’ll find that we’re a ragtag band of chattel whose parents sold us to the highest bidder.” Luther scoffs. “Which is a circumstantial, if lovely, connection. Sure, there was a lot of pressure bonding at times, and watching the pissing contests between our number One and Two has always been a wealth of entertainment, but I grow weary of your uninspired hetero-masculinity. Besides, Pogo is making it very hard for me to steal from you.” 

“When did you become Shakespeare?” Allison narrows her eyes at him. “Can drugs do that?”

“I knew you took my iPod,” Diego says. 

“And what are you going to do? Get a job? You?” Luther hisses.

“I’m a man of many talents,” Klaus smiles. Diego looks a little ill. 

“No,” Allison gasps. “Booooo.”

“And how long until that goes south? And you come crawling back?” Luther says. “How long until you realise getting high is a dead end? That you want to be more than some fucking junky.”

Klaus takes a deep breath, and places his hand over his brother’s heart. “Never. As long as this is the alternative, I will die in a fucking gutter.”

Diego chokes out a laugh. Bitter. 

“Anyway, this has been great, but I’m going. Adieu. Adieu. Don’t ever call me.”

He’s halfway down the street before Diego catches up to him. “Here,” he grunts, and shoves something into Klaus’ hand. A scrunched up phone number. 

“I wasn’t kidding about not staying in contact,” Klaus tells him. “Besides, I already have your number.”

“It’s my new one,” Diego says. “Old, but, newish. One Dad doesn’t have.”

“Oh!” Klaus laughs. “I guess I’m not the only one with a side hustle.”

“Whatever,” Diego says. “If you need me, call. I start at the police academy in a couple of months, but, before then I’m just moving across town.”

“Oh goodie, the police, more opportunities for extrajudicial executions.”

“Happy birthday, asshole.”

 

**\- May, 2018 -**

“What about you, Klaus?”

Klaus drops his heels to the buckled linoleum. He wasn’t paying attention, of course, but that’s probably why this flat-mouthed psychologist called on him. He shrugs. He imagines it’s like being in high school, like any hint of delinquency, disinterest, puts a target on your back. But he wouldn’t know. He’s never spent a day in school in his life.

“In order to embrace sobriety,” the man tells him, “we need to confront the things we’re running away from. The terrors that make sobriety unbearable. We need to slay those demons. But first we need to name them.”

Klaus shrugs again. He knows the drill. It’s almost the exact same, every time. _Dead mother; dead father; dead baby; daddy used beat me; incest; incest; some other kind of child molestation; I watched my best friend die._ Unbearable. He doesn’t know how they’re expected to listen to each other. 

“Klaus-”

“My name,” he says, and it comes up of him unbidden, “is number Four.” There’s a baby crying somewhere. Such a tiny, vulnerable apparition. “Do you know,” he asks. “What it’s like to be born with purpose?”

The psychologist shrugs an invitation. There’s something screeching in his chest for him to be quiet, bring it in, close it back up inside of him. He drags his hand down his face, grounded by the rasp of his own stubble. “Well, it’s shit.” 

Silence, which is his to fill. Unbearable. Unbearable. “Go on.”

“My mother didn’t want me, I can only assume, since I was conjured out of thin air. A quick labour, but bloody, and suddenly: a baby. And then she sold me. Just before the Berlin Wall came down, they were difficult times, I’m sure she needed the money. I can’t say I wouldn’t do the same.” He breathes, but his lungs feel small, tight and rigid inside his chest.

“And my Dad, or should I say the man who bought me, he was a man of purpose. And so we were to be purposeful too - hard not to be when your very existence, the very fact of you, is to play a leading role in the cosmic ballet. Funny, when you’re raised to believe that your life has _meaning_ , that it’s _important_ \- funny how you start to feel like it's really not about you at all. Who you are, what you want. None of it matters, it all pales in the face of purpose.” 

He breathes in, and out. In, and out. The edges of his vision crackle; water, a cracked egg, dripping down the back of his spine.

“I spent years, years, mastering martial arts. Knife throwing. Bomb making, bomb diffusion. At ten I could give any Black Ops agent a run for their money. We all could. I wasn’t strong like my brothers and sister. Or fast. But the body learns, and the body remembers. Humans can become exquisitely crafted weapons.”

“I’m sorry,” Ben says. Klaus can’t see his face under his hood. His voice is strained, quiet. “I still can’t believe what they did to us.”

“Everything that happens to you - every moment of terror, isolation, privation, it too has purpose. It’s all in service of your glittering, transplendent destiny. Unavoidable. Predetermined. They put a knife in your hand and they say: kill. So you do. They put a knife to your throat and they say: die. And you watch your brother die. And they say: you have to do it again tomorrow. And the next day, and the next day. Unavoidable. Predetermined. This is your purpose. This is your responsibility.”

He cries quietly, Ben. He always did. But this time, there’s no one else to hear. Klaus swallows, and his throat clicks.

“But when you’re high, so high you can barely move, much less speak. It all just. Melts away. And you get to be nobody. Just a blip - an unremarkable, purposeless life. Free from it.”

 

**\- March, 2019 -**

His skin is blue, where Dave touches him. White hot. Klaus lists into the sensation. 

“You never told me about this,” Dave says. But he isn’t angry. Klaus has seen him angry - this is just marvelling. Drunk on the impossibility of it.

“It didn’t seem relevant,” Klaus tells him. He didn’t want him to know.

“It’s okay,” Dave says, pressing a kiss to the back of his neck, the flat plane behind his ear. “You’re allowed to have secrets.”

“I don’t want to have secrets,” Klaus says. “Not from you. Not anymore.”

He hums. “You saved the world. How does it feel?” Dave’s hands move down across his stomach, which aches, aches, aches, but feels lighter where he’s touching him. Like as long as Dave’s hands are on him, his guts just might stay put. 

“Over.” Klaus says. “It’s done.” 

“So now what?” Dave asks him, flirtatious. Fingers toying with the cusp of his belt. 

Klaus brings his hand up, touches the line of his jaw. Dave hooks his chin over the curve of Klaus’ shoulder. Klaus relaxes into it, and they sway. 

“Now,” Klaus says, “I think we have a date in Iowa. I hear there’s a pretty girl named Stella waiting for us, and corn. So much corn.”

Dave laughs, and nips at him. Klaus feels choked up with elation. Overfull with it.

“But first,” Klaus tightens his grip. “I need your tongue in my ass, like, forty years ago. You understand."

“Yeah, baby, I do,” Dave chuckles, kissing him, kissing him, awkward and stretched but so, so sweet. “Come on,” he says. “I wanna be good to you. We’ve got nowhere to be.”

**Author's Note:**

> I did not edit this


End file.
